Goodreads

seedlings

Today marks the first warm AND non rainy day in our part of Washington this year. As I sit here and write this it is actually 70 degrees out! Being an all ginger family that means lots and lots of sunscreen. I’m hoping all this sun finally helps the tiny amount of plants I have on my back deck to actually grow. As of May this year Olympia has had only thirteen days of sun. THIRTEEN. Makes it hard to grow things when it’s super cloudy and rainy all the time.

This is the first time I’ve ever tried gardening and it’s definitely not as easy as I thought it was going to be. I mean, I knew gardening took work but for some reason I thought container gardening would be easier.

My house has a fairly big yard but it’s also surrounded by trees and does not get much sun. So we decided to have a few pots of veggies on our back deck which gets quite a bit of sun.

I started my few plants from seedlings in February which went great! They were growing like weeds so I thought I had this magical green thumb… so not the case. Once I transferred my seedlings to bigger pots I lost almost all of them. Luckily I had a few back up seedlings. I put them outside WAY too early and lost quite a few from that. Lastly we had a HUGE windstorm on May 4th that killed a couple… needless to say my gardening experience has been less than fruitful. Or in this case, vegetableful.

I was having a really hard time with it at first and felt like a complete failure. How was I ever going to homestead if I can’t even keep a few plants alive? But I told myself this is my first year and I’m going to make mistakes.

So now I only have a few plants out there, a tomato that I just bought, a couple of brussels sprouts, three lettuce plants, two strawberries, and six onions. It’s definitely not going to keep us alive through the winter, but I had to start somewhere.

To make up for what is lacking in my veggie garden I signed up for a CSA through one of the local farms. I get to pick up my first box on Saturday at our farmers market and I am SO excited. I will let you guys know how that goes next week. Hope everyone had a great weekend!